Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on ‘The Situation of Our Time’)

“The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime.
There lies the body half-undressed,
We all had reason to detest,
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved
And under lock and key the cause
That makes a nonsense of our laws.”— British-American poet, playwright, and essayist W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940),” from Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (1976)

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Authenticity and Originality)

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1963)

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Why ‘We Must Love One Another or Die’)

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.” — English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “September 1, 1939”

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on ‘The Poetic Imagination’ and the Statesman)

"All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman."— English poet, critic, and playwright W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "The Poet and The City," The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1963)

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Evil and Imagination)

“Evil…has every advantage but one—it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil…but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.” —English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “At the End of the Quest, Victory” (review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King), The New York Times, Jan. 22, 1956

Quote of the Day (W. H. Auden, on the ‘Leaping Light’ of Summer)

“Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers…
And this full view    
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.”—English-born American poet, critic and playwright W. H. Auden (1907-1973), “On This Island,” the title poem of the On This Island collection (1937)

Well, since it was the first week of October six years ago when I took this photo, “Indian summer” (not the torrid mid-summer variety we’re experiencing now) might be a bit closer to my experience.

But the interplay of clouds, light, and the water celebrated by W. H. Auden made an impression on me when I walked around Brooklyn Bridge Park back then. Auden himself was still two years away from coming to the U.S. when he wrote these verses (I don't know the locale that inspired him0, but when he finally came to the U.S. and settled in Brooklyn Heights for a year, he would have occasion to see this sight for himself.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on May)

“May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.”—English poet, playwright and critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “May,” originally published in 1934, reprinted in Collected Poems of W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson (1991)
 
I took the image accompanying this post in May 2014, at New York’s Central Park.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, on Unprecedented Events)

“Always the following wind of history

Of others' wisdom makes a buoyant air

Till we come suddenly on pockets where

Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem

Abrupt, untrained, competing with no lie

Our fathers shouted once.”—English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973) (in photograph) and English novelist-memoirist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1936)

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on the Decline of a Once-Great Power)

“The piers are pummeled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves….

“Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs,

Eye each flu-infected city.”—English poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “The Fall of Rome,” The Nation, June 14, 1947

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Freud’s Influence on the Man-on-the-Street)

“Today, thanks to [Sigmund] Freud, the man-on-the-street knows (to quote by an inaccurate memory from Punch) that, when he thinks a thing, the thing he thinks is not the thing he thinks he thinks, but only the thing he thinks he thinks he thinks.” —English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “Sigmund Freud,” The New Republic, October 6, 1952

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on One Leader’s Chilling ‘Perfection, of a Kind’)

 “Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” from Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (1968)

W.H. Auden, With Wise Advice for the New Year

“Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there

May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings their release.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter” (1940)

“New Year Letter” is far longer than my favorite W.H. Auden poem, “In Memory of W.B.Yeats.” But if it didn’t have that elegy's concentrated power, it issued an equally ringing summons to the best human impulses toward tolerance and hope only a few months into a second world war that had arisen from the most hideous brutality the world had ever known, as I think you'll see in the above lines.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on ‘The Cross of the Moment’)

“We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.”― British poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)